Watercolour and pencil, Meadow with trees, Jean-François Millet,1866-68

A meadow with a single tree to the right and clumps of foliage on the left, evidence of a village along the horizon

Purchased on the 17th of June 1882 by Constantine Alexander Ionides for £68 together with CAI.50, CAI.51, and CAI.52; bequethed to the V&A in 1901.

This drawing was made in the surrounding countryside of Vichy, a city in the central region of France, where artist Jean-François Millet used to stay in the early summer. Although landscapes without figures are rare in Millet's work the artist produced many sketches of this type while staying at Vichy between 1866 and 1868. He would rent a carriage to explore the surrounding countryside, in particular the hilly uplands above Cusset. He would stop frequently to make rapid pencil or ink drawings in small sketchbooks. These sketches were later re-worked in the studio when the artist added watercolour.

This work presents a level meadow with scarcely visible buildings along the horizon. Its broad expanse and small touches of translucent colour perhaps influenced the works of Impressionists like Camille Pissarro.

Millet was a founding member of the Barbizon school of painting whose members also included Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, and Charles-François Daubigny. The group advocated a push toward Naturalism and utilized muted tonalities, looseness, and soft rendurings.

This watercolour sketch is one of four landscapes in the V&A collection by the French painter Jean-François Millet. The work displays his characteristic lightness of touch, and muted tonalities, that stayed with him throughout his life, whereas the attacntion to nature and the rendering of atmospheric effects are typical of the Barbizon School, of which he was a founding member.

CAI.53